O.J. Simpson was one of the most famous sportsmen in America.
But in 1994 the police charged him with hacking his wife and her lover to death.
Simpson went on the run in a Ford Bronco.
He was followed by dozens of police cars and news helicopters.
95 million people watched the two-hour chase, live on TV.
Meanwhile, attorney Robert Kardashian read out Simpson’s prepared suicide note.
Simpson didn’t die, but it all seemed a confession of guilt, an open and shut case.
And later, in court, the evidence was overwhelming.
But the defence had one straw to grasp at.
A glove, which the police said the murderer wore, appeared too small for Simpson.
Johnny Cochrane, Simpson’s lawyer, managed to build this into an argument.
He got it to stick in the jury’s mind above all the other evidence.
He did it by making up the line: “If the glove don’t fit you must acquit.”
And every time another piece of prosecution evidence was raised, the answer was simply: “If the glove don’t fit you must acquit.”
Because of the way it was phrased, it seemed to distil all the complicated legal arguments down to a single point.
And, despite all the evidence against him, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty.
The power of logic, delivered in rhyme, persuaded the jury.
This is a cognitive bias known as the “Rhyme-as-reason effect”.
A saying is more truthful and memorable when it’s delivered in rhyme.
Mathew McGlone proved this in a paper at the Dept. of Psychology at Lafayette College.
Many more respondents remembered the line: “What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals” than remembered the line: “What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks”.
It seems obvious to us, so we may wonder why more advertising doesn’t use it.
After all, it’s something advertising used to do well.
One of the most successful public health campaigns ever, was a poster about covering your mouth: “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases”.
One of the most successful road safety campaigns, was about keeping your distance: “Only a fool breaks the two-second rule”.
A campaign that saved countless lives was for seat belts: “Clunk, Click, every trip”.
Another campaign hijacked an entire market, and was responsible for selling over 20 million cans a year: “Beanz Meanz Heinz”,
In the 1920s, ad agency Mather & Crowther built a fruit into a health food with the line: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”.
(Many people still think that’s age-old wisdom, handed down over generations.)
The same agency made milk a staple with the line: “Drinka Pinta Milka Day”.
And rhyming logic dominated the holiday market: “Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it”.
It also made a chocolate bar into an energy food: “A Mars a day helps you work, rest, and play”.
Not only is rhyming logic more believable, it’s also more repeatable.
The wartime propaganda campaign to make secrecy essential caught on across the English-speaking world with the line: “Loose lips sinks ships”.
Even the phrase you’ll hear repeated today, all over Essex every June: “No carbs before Marbs”.
The learning is that rhyming logic makes a statement seem unarguably sensible.
Wouldn’t you have thought that was a good thing for advertising to do?
When you want to change someone’s mind, when you want it to stick in their head, when you want it to get it passed on.
What we now call going viral.
We know it works, I wonder why people are so embarrassed to use it.
Think a lot of anti rhyme sentiments can be traced to Hollywood/BBC.
I remember watching Lord Peter Wimsey. He worked, in one ep, for an ad
agency. All he did was come up with daft rhymes. One for butter was “it’s
a far, far butter thing I do ..”
Because producing good work is no longer fashionable. People like to claim it is, but all the evidence points in another direction.
I think that the majority of people working in advertising are embarrassed to be here and want it to be something other than it is.
(That’s the charitable explanation. The uncharitable explanation is that they’re idiots.)
Jingles too. And what the Jordan Case McGrath agency used to call “namemonics.”
Zestfully clean.
Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfinger.
Tum ta tum tums.
As the kids say, that shit worked.
Keep your ads hot by reading Dave Trott.
When I got my first job in ad agency in London it was a bit overwhelming. Nobody in my family had ever worked in the capital, or any big city for that matter, so there was nobody I could ask for advice.
But I took my work seriously, maybe too seriously for some people, and after work I really did not want to socialise with advertising people, I got enough of them at work.
Fortunately for me a school friend had been living and working in London for a couple of years.
She knew her way around the west end, and was training to be a nurse at University College Hospital.
So we would meet up about once a week, and I knew she worked very hard and was very dedicated to her training.
Sometimes she would visit my office in Covent Garden and just sit and take it all in, quietly overwhelmed herself at the amount of money flowing through this business, money that the NHS didn’t have.
One evening we out for a drink in a pub in St Martin’s Lane.
My nursing friend asked what was bothering me and I got pretty verbal and angry about a client who kept turning down my ideas for a trade ad for Bombay Gin.
Then I asked her about her week.
The nurse told me she had experienced a Code Blue in men’s surgical.
I asked her what that meant.
A Code Blue was a heart attack victim.
She had come on duty and found a man had fallen from his bed in the throes of a heart attack and was lying on the floor.
She told me she didn’t panic or get emotional, her training just kicked in and she lifted the guy onto his bed then phoned internally for the crash truck with the paddles for heart attack victims.
Unfortunately they couldn’t revive the man, and he died.
My nursing friend told me this in a very matter of fact way, stressing that her training had really worked.
And then I thought, I just work in advertising.
Advertising is simply an office job.
I don’t think I could have coped with a heart attack victim the way my friend had.
Because I did an office job, that’s all.
Back in 1996, my team and I were brainstorming a pitch for Singapore’s biannual Crime Prevention campaign. The brief was along the lines of “because Singapore has very low crime rates, Singaporeans and visitors to Singapore tend to take things for granted and let their guard down, making it easy for whatever criminals are out there to take advantage of their carelessness. We need to remind people not take things for granted.” Someone in the brainstorm said “So what we’re trying to say is that low crime doesn’t mean no crime, right?” And thus was born a slogan that is not only still in use 22 years later but has entered the national lexicon. If only agencies could charge loyalties for slogans like this!
I enjoyed every particle of that article.
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Fantastic Dave, enjoyable and enlightening.